Chapter 4

"So it's not really a request as much as it is... a command."

She tilted her head to the left. Or perhaps it was the right. It was to his right anyway. Was the mirror image the opposite or the same? Was looking at someone the same as a mirror image. Basically, if twins looked at each other, would it be the same as looking in a mirror?

"Right sure I guess so. But it's a polite command. I think they call it the imperative. Well no they call it... a request."

They'd been going back and forth on their ride into the town to grab butter and milk for their brownie mix. It was his idea the whole time. She had just come along for the ride, but really it was her car, and he had not renewed his license yet as his birthday had came and went a few weeks back. It was the safer option. He had the knack for not paying attention to the speed limit and attracting the Po-9.

"Besides, you would have been sitting at the cottage doing nothing the whole time. Company's company."

"I have to get the place ready for when everyone else comes up." She offered. "And I enjoy being alone sometime. Reading, thinking... napping."

They both chuckled at that. Although his was more of a chortle. He would call it a chortle. Chortling involved much more guttural noises and the nose in some way. That's how he felt every time he had ever read the word anyway.

The laughter was an inside joke. I'm telling you this, the reader, because you wouldn't get it otherwise. Maybe you would, but I won't be telling you the inside joke. That's up for you to either figure out or create for yourself. Welcome to my world.

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Relative silence, anyway. The 4-cylinder engine was firing on all cylinders. Which was important because one of the cylinders had been getting stuck recently until he had convinced her to bring the car in to a mechanic. She had hesitated because her father had always taken care of that. But he was away again for work, this time to Europe for a month. He had found that strange, that her father had worked like that for most of her life. But he was a good man as far as he could tell. Every interaction he had with him had felt genuine, and he had always seemed interested to know his daughter's friends lives and interests. For instance, he had heard about his woodworking with Tim, and had asked with interest about the projects he was taking on.

"So are you excited for the weekend!" She suddenly exclaimed, bringing him out of the moment of distracted reflection. 

"Yeah sure. I mean, Yeah. Sure." He breathed a laugh this time. He knew he didn't sound convincing. She had always been the more bubbly excitable one. He had just always been brooding and occasionally flash-mob angry. 

Going Through the Motions Ch. 2 part 2

Choosing a boulder that was squat and waist-high, somewhat like a large muffin, he slowly eased himself up until his feet no longer touched the dirt. He reached down and pulled his pant legs up, to let his hairy legs breath. He could feel the blades of the long grass that was growing around the boulders. The big riding mower that Tim probably used couldn't possibly get into these boulders. In fact, someone, maybe Tim, had built a low rock wall lining the whole of the property and the area around the barn.

With the beech trees overhead offering some shade from the sun, he looked out and decided to try a meditative technique that Sally's friend Craig had taught him. Well, not really taught him. Craig had just been trying to calm him down one night at a party, after he had had one of his rages at some dumb quirky thing another kid at the party had done.

"Bro, you've gotta calm down man..." Craig had pulled him outside to the screened in porch. "It's not that big a deal, definitely not worth fighting a kid over..."


"That's not it man. It's the principle of the thing. The kid didn't even ask who's drink it was, just took it and dumped it. Fuckin' selfish prick who doesn't think of anyone else. He's been doin' stuff like that all night."


"Dude, I know Kyle, he was just trying to help keep the place clean man. Was there a lot of beer left, or what? Look, it's not that important."


"Alright I know it's not. I get that it's stupid. I just can't help getting so pissed sometimes, and it's sometimes the smallest things that set me off. I just... I don't know."


"Have you tried some sort of anger management shit?"


"What like a psychologist? Man I'm not that messed up. I mean I've been to one once, back in Colorado, but that's not why."

"Well I'm just looking for things to help you. Ever done Yoga? Meditation?"


"Never thought about it. Seems like it'd be okay, I just never had the reason."


"Okay look, this is something they teach you early, I mean basics. Try focusing on your breathing, sitting straight. I'm gonna go back inside, but you sit out here doing that breathing thing for a while. It might help. Whenever you're straight, come on back in. There'll be a beer waiting for you."


He been surprised by the suggestion, and even more so at his own answer. All of that spiritual or religious stuff had seemed soft to him before, and in particular

Going Through the Motions Ch. 2 part 1

Tim had a frustratingly slow way of speaking. It was something like a southern drawl given to a northerner. Essentially, he would take just as long as a southerner to say something, but all of his words would be quick and succinct. He appreciated the efficiency of words, and the way in which Tim seemed to read them off of his mind as a sort of pre-speech proof-reading. But when he was burning with passionate argumentative energy, he wanted answers quick, damnit!

"You have got to understand," Tim was saying, "that you are asking excellent questions, but attacking instead of receiving. We can sit here all day and I can field your questions, but if none of my answers surprise you you won't stop and consider them to be truth."

What he was saying had a ring of truth to it. He had been sitting in Tim's wood shop aggressively questioning him for the past hour about his belief in Biblical mythology. At least, that's how he characterized the Biblical narrative anyway: it was a mythology that was comprised of a whole lot of superstitious people's writings.

Tim had agreed to let him work in his wood shop for some under-the-table cash until he could find a real job. Tim owned a small custom cabinetry business and did a number of other side projects. Apparently he was self-employed, but this being the third week of knowing Tim, he hadn't felt comfortable enough to ask. The only reason Tim had extended the offer to him was because Sally had told Tim that he needed a job badly. Since graduating college and buying a one-way ticket from Colorado, he hadn't even received so much as one call from his applications. So much for the Bachelor's degree in English literature.

But the wood shop was the perfect fit. There was something to working the wood. He had always felt calm and at peace, allowing his mind to wander and wrestle with the concerns that were weighing on it. Shop was actually his favorite class in High School, even more so than English, but his mother had told him that he had to go to college instead of jumping right into construction like he had wanted to. And who was he to argue against his mother while their world was all sorts of messed up?

Their current conversation was sparked by a slight comment that Tim had made while showing him the new project that Tim wanted him working on.

A hand planar and some shavings

"You know, Jesus was a carpenter." He had said, while walking towards the lathe. Something about the way Tim said that really irked him. It was an open invite into the conversation, but until that point the wood shop had been a sort of sacred ground where they did not talk about Jesus.

They had agreed to meet once a week to talk Jesus-talk since that first meeting two weeks ago, in a coffee shop that roasted its own fair-trade beans. But the time in the wood shop had always been strictly business and teaching how to work the different machines and stay safe in what was potentially a butchers workshop. Tim was missing part of his right pointer finger, the last bit. He would hold it up as a reminder of safety every time he was about to do something wrong with a machine.

It was a cool arrangement. He was actually something like an apprentice, but Tim hadn't called him that. It was just how it felt. Here is the wood stock. When we get orders, we'll plan out exactly what we need and you can pull out the materials. Measure carefully, because

Going Through the Motions Ch. 1

The dirt path had chunks of asphalt tossed about. A tale of an earlier time, when the cars they drove had to be handcranked for convenience. Part and parcel of the story of the land. Times forgotten.

He didn't like those kind. How was the asphalt made? The stories he meant, he didn't like those kinds of stories that were lost and forgotten forever, beneath the "sands of time". Whatever that means. He had heard that term once, somewhere. I'll be lying somewhere in the sands of time... Ah, Kryptonite, that's where!

No matter. His thoughts were scattered like the balls on the billiard table. He could either re-rack them or start hitting them one by one into their pockets as he walked.

Walking and hiking were a necessity for him. That was this. This was that. He was walking. Thinking, pretending he knew what was real and not real, what was in his mind and what was coming out of his mind.

The imagination, that's what led him here. Here on this dirt path in the "town woods", which clearly had been paved some decades in the past, in a time where his father had been born. His mother too, he supposed. His mother had been born then too.

The path was gently curving through the town forest, until it hit a fork. Going left it went down towards the water. He had heard or read or thought somewhere that the river had been wide and flowing before industrialization hit. Now, with the town's population having swelled to 30 thousand residents, from the few thousand that had been there at the beginning of the century, and the surrounding towns using the river as their water supply, all that remained were swamplands, impassable lands that no developer wanted a part of as it would cost a fortune to fill in the land with something solid to build upon. The sad part of all of it? The river was now shrunken to a shallow pool of its former glory. Glory that, to be truthful, was nothing compared to a river like the Mississippi or the Colorado.

There he was thinking of these things again. "These things", he constantly questioned himself! What did he mean by "these things"? Every time he started thinking about "society" he started wondering about the buzz-word actions of the day. Sustainability. Green. Almost always he bumped up against this quiet seething rage inside himself and the other high-minded individuals he had been surrounded by in college. This rage... to put a thought into it. It was as much about the sense of guilt he was made to feel with the veil pulled back from his eyes as it was about the desire to do "good". Knowledge had certainly led him to sorrow.

Going back to these chunks of asphalt. Who had built the road here? Why had they built it? What had been here in the past, hundreds of years ago?

Native Americans had lived on and in and of the land for tens of thousands of years before Western Europeans--the more "advanced" society--had come along. What did they know that the great minds of the 20th century didn't? What did they know of life, of living, that we didn't? What did they know of Holy?

That's what he realized he was bumping against. The affront to the sacred. The assailant upon the holiness and amazingness of nature that was Western living. Funny, that.

What had it come to that we could no longer enjoy that which nature gave us without ruining it for the future. Well what did we think of the future? What did God think of the future? Did God exist anyway?